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Hardening of the Nile

We often associate heart disease with all the bad things from modern life: Fast food, stress, a sedentary lifestyle stemming from our modern comforts, etc. But it turns out that the ancient Egyptians suffered from atherosclerosis.

CT scans of 22 Egyptian mummies, several around 3,000 years old, detected significant deposits of calcium in 5 of the 16 mummies with preserved arteries, definitive evidence the people had atherosclerosis while alive. Four other mummies with intact cardiovascular remains had deposits the researchers said probably indicated hardening of the arteries.

I’m not sure what good this data really does us at this point, but if nothing else, it’s making me long for a time when we had no CT scans but already had drive thrus.

Dispensed as
link | Prescribed on November 17, 2009

Niacin: Study Shows Heart Benefits

Years ago, a cardiologist suggested that I take Niacin to lower cholesterol. Now, a small but extremely closely watched study showed that niacin performed better than the active ingredient in some blockbuster drugs.

It isn’t often that a study involving a couple of hundred people shakes up medical science.

That’s what happened Monday, when doctors formally reported that lowly niacin, a B vitamin, did a significantly better job of shrinking artery plaque than a billion-dollar blockbuster called ezetimibe, the active ingredient in the cholesterol drugs Zetia and Vytorin.

Dispensed as
link | Prescribed on November 16, 2009

Getting the Picture on H1N1

Boston.com’s always excellent Big Picture collects some photos of people around the world who are dealing, one way or another, with the H1N1 spread.

swine-flu-photo

Track the latest swine flu news.

http://addictomatic.com/topic/swine+flu#satzmn.fdiyqou.blhkgxe
Dispensed as
link | Prescribed on November 16, 2009

Cocaine, Spices, Rocket Fuel: Drink Up

You may not want to think about it, but traces of some pretty wild stuff
make their way into the water we drink.

For instance, thyme and sage spike during Thanksgiving, cinnamon surges all winter, chocolate and vanilla show up during weekends (presumably from party-related goodies), and waffle-cone and caramel-corn remnants skyrocket around the Fourth of July.

The Puget Sound study is one of several ongoing efforts to investigate the unexpected ingredients that find their way into the global water supply.

Around the world, scientists are finding trace amounts of substances—from sugar and spice to heroine, rocket fuel, and birth control—that might be having unintended consequences for humans and wildlife alike.

Dispensed as ,
link | Prescribed on November 16, 2009

Lose Weight by Fasting (not every day)

It’s only a small study, but early findings suggest that On-off fasting helps obese adults shed pounds.

Even though the study participants ate whatever they wanted on their non-fasting days, they lost an average of 5.6 kilograms (about 12 pounds) after eight weeks, Dr. Krista A. Varady of the University of Illinois at Chicago and her colleagues found.

What’s more, their total and “bad” LDL cholesterol levels dropped, and their blood pressure fell.

“People lost anywhere from about 7 pounds to about 30 pounds and that was in a very short amount of time,” Varady said. And, she added, the program was pretty easy for the study participants to follow.

Dispensed as
link | Prescribed on November 16, 2009

Being Fat in Japan

Although smoking is a big problem, obesity rates in Japan are wildly lower than in the U.S. Part of this could be exercise. A lot of it has to do with diet and portion size. And maybe some if it has to do with peer pressure as described by a journalist who used to teach high school in Japan.

They called him Mr. Jumbo.

I was teaching English at a high school in Hiroshima, Japan, in 2001, when a group of boys approached to introduce me to a classmate.

“His name is Jumbo-san—Mr. Jumbo!” the boys said, laughing.

“Why do you call him that?” I asked. “Because he’s big-sized,” one boy replied, curling his arms out from his waist and wobbling around in an imitation.

A smiling boy stepped forward. He was about 5 feet 8, maybe 175 pounds. Hardly jumbo. I was a couple inches taller and more than 10 pounds heavier than he was. “You’re not that big,” I told Mr. Jumbo. “In America, you wouldn’t even make the football team.”

Of course, peer pressure itself may work in entirely different ways in different cultures. When I was in junior high, a phys ed teacher described a race between me and another kid as the battle of the bulge. Not only wasn’t I motivated to lose weight, I reframed his comments and took him to mean I was well-endowed. Mr. Jumbo indeed.

Dispensed as
link | Prescribed on November 16, 2009

Teens are Moving, But Still Getting Fatter

Even with all the video games and computer time, the amount of excercise that teens get on a daily basis hasn’t changed much since 1991. But the rate of teen obesity has increased dramatically.

The report, published last week in the journal Obesity Reviews, finds that the amount of physical activity among U.S. teens has not in fact changed significantly over the past two decades, even while that population has gotten heavier. “On the one hand, we have seen the obesity-prevalence increase, but we don’t see a decrease in physical activity,” says Dr. Youfa Wang, an associate professor at the Center for Human Nutrition at Hopkins and lead author of the study. “This suggests that physical activity is not a good explanation for the increase in prevalence of obesity.”

It’s gotta be the eating, folks.

Dispensed as , ,
link | Prescribed on November 10, 2009

It’s Like Viagra, But It’s Viagra

The FDA is warning customers of a product called Stiff Nights that the all-natural herbs that give a Viagra-like reaction are actually chemicals that are pretty much, well, Viagra.

“‘Stiff Nights’, a product marketed as a dietary supplement for sexual enhancement, contains an ingredient that can dangerously lower blood pressure and is illegal,” the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said in a statement.

The FDA began probing Stiff Nights after receiving a customer complaint about the product. The agency did not reveal the nature of the complaint.

Yes, the author of this story did go there and use the word “probing” above. Man, if you can’t trust a dietary supplement called Stiff Nights, what can you trust?

Dispensed as ,
link | Prescribed on November 10, 2009

Good News About Bad Genes

There’s no getting around it. Having a certain genetic makeup can make you prone to bad behavior and psychological problems. But what if those same genes can be turned around? What if the bad versions of genes are really just extra-sensitive and therefore can be turned into the good versions with the right parenting and environment?

Could so-called bad genes be the key to your success?

Recent thinking, illustrated in the Atlantic’s The Science of Success, suggests that this could be the case.

This vulnerability hypothesis, as we can call it, has already changed our conception of many psychic and behavioral problems. It casts them as products not of nature or nurture but of complex “gene-environment interactions.” Your genes don’t doom you to these disorders. But if you have “bad” versions of certain genes and life treats you ill, you’re more prone to them.

Recently, however, an alternate hypothesis has emerged from this one and is turning it inside out. This new model suggests that it’s a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.

For what it’s worth, my JV football coach constantly insisted that the key to our success was to identify our weaknesses and make them our strengths. We continued to suck, but we were all pretty clear on why.

Dispensed as ,
link | Prescribed on November 10, 2009

Turn Your Head and Cough … Into Your Phone

iphone-coughA decent health worker can determine a lot about your respiratory health by listening to your cough. Now, some scientists think software on your phone should be able to accomplish the same thing.

Whether a cough is dry or wet, or “productive” or “non-productive” (referring to the presence of mucus on the lungs), can give a doctor information about what is causing that cough, for example whether it is caused by a bacterial or a viral infection.

Health workers can distinguish the different kinds of cough by sound. Now, it is claimed, the new software will do the same, and will save patients a trip to the surgery – or tell them when they are at risk of serious illness.

And you thought sitting next to someone using their cell phone was irritating now…

Dispensed as
link | Prescribed on November 9, 2009

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